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How did Soviet Jews rebuild their lives after the Holocaust? How did they navigate Stalinist rule, reclaim their place in society, and seek retribution against those responsible for wartime atrocities? This study uncovers the resilience and adaptability of Soviet Jews in postwar Moldavia, a borderland where identities were fluid, loyalties were tested, and survival demanded ingenuity. Using newly accessed archives and oral histories, Diana Dumitru reveals how Jews pursued professional success, resisted discrimination, and sought vengeance on their wrongdoers. Far from passive subjects of repression, they carved out spaces for agency in an era of contradictions - between social mobility and state-imposed limitations, between the Soviet promise of equality and the rising anti-Jewish drive of the early 1950s, and between ideological control and personal ambition. In doing so, this study offers a fresh perspective on a complex, understudied chapter of 20th-century history.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. The return; 2. Jewish social mobility in the newly sovietizing periphery; 3. 'Life in Romania was better than in the Soviet Union': how Bessarabian Jews tried (and Frequently Failed) to become dutiful soviet citizens; 4. Seeking revenge and justice after the holocaust; 5. Fighting antisemitism in its manyfold forms; 6. From starry skies to the abyss: Jewish national dreams after 1948; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Diana Dumitru is Ion Ratiu Professor in Romanian Studies at Georgetown University. Her research explores the entangled histories of violence, ideology, and identity in Eastern Europe. Dumitru is the author of The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (2016) and serves as an Editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.
